A modest proposal for fighting gun violence:

A man living in the shadows walks into a suburban gym carrying a gun. Those who are about to die have no idea what the man, so full of rage and self-loathing, is about to do. They are busy going about their lives dancing the pounds off, lost in their own histories, passions, dreams, regrets, ambitions, successes and disappointments.

Within minutes, three women are dead and nine others are injured because the killer, a man who insists in living in the shadows of his own mind, isn't in touch with the reality of other people.

Like the coward he's been his whole life, the killer puts a bullet in his own brain rather than deal with the consequences of his horrific act.

Four days later, a green Buick Regal with "fancy rims" cruises the streets of Pittsburgh's West End. In a two-hour span, a young woman and a young man are murdered in separate shootings.

The Buick Regal is identified at the scene of both incidents. The shooters are still on the loose, but it is only a matter of time before they will have to answer for their horrific act. It isn't likely they'll kill themselves to avoid the social opprobrium.

Though these murders are separated by a world of motives, income and circumstance, they have one thing in common -- the killers' depraved indifference to the value of human life.

The shootings originate in the same place where compassion, humanity, empathy, common sense and sanity go to die.

We know more about George Sodini, the man who killed three women at the gym, than we do about the anonymous killers driving around the West End in a green Buick Regal, but we can safely assume that they've lost touch with the qualities that make us all human.

We can also assume that they're clear about the Second Amendment and their right to own as many guns as they can physically carry into their dark corner of reality.

Yesterday, a local high school teacher sent me a link to a depressing 31-minute video about three gangs on Pittsburgh's East End. The gangs interviewed include members of the East Hill Bloods, the Dallas Avenue Crips out of Homewood and the much-feared Hill Top 581 Crips.

The anonymous filmmaker quizzes the young men about their feuds, their willingness to live in a perpetual warfare with other neighborhoods and the ages of their youngest members.

One gang trots out an 11-year-old who makes gang signs while constantly looking to older members for approval. Later, the boy, who looks even younger than his stated age, raps about some lethal business on Pittsburgh's mean streets.

Though he sounds like a cartoon character, you wonder if he already has blood on his hands and whether his mother cares enough about him to stop his inevitable slide to an early funeral.

All three gangs proudly display their guns, but only one of them breaks out the kind of heavy artillery usually associated with military insurgencies in the Third World.

Several Hill Top 581 Crips wear masks reminiscent of the Zapatistas in Mexico while brandishing weapons that would cause most SWAT units to have second thoughts about storming their graffiti-laden enclaves.

The video made me wonder whether the Second Amendment's most extreme advocates would justify the gangs' right to stockpile such weapons out of a perverse sense of consistency or go along with reasonable limitations on gun ownership.

Perhaps the most extreme gun-rights advocates are on to something. If we were all armed, even while doing aerobics, sitting in a classroom or in our church services, the "bad guys" would think twice about disturbing the peace. They may not always be rational, but surely they would resort to less lethal means if they feared death at the hands of their potential victims, right?

Packing heat would be a welcome return to the 19th-century frontier ethos. Exercising our right to live and die like Wild Bill Hickock would be a major step forward in American civilization. A country like that wouldn't need stricter gun laws. Such a place would already be paradise on Earth.